


until you return to me

by lovefrompluto



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Angst, F/M, Happy Ending, Mild Sexual Content, One Shot, Post-Canon, Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker Fix-It, sort of kind of a reincarnation fic?, there's a lot going on here tbh
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-06
Updated: 2020-03-06
Packaged: 2021-02-28 19:42:10
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,355
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23032645
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lovefrompluto/pseuds/lovefrompluto
Summary: "Sweetheart," he murmurs, and it’s heartbreaking. "This is not a life."A sob rips through her throat, a defiant last stand."It's better than nothing!" she shouts, hot tears coursing down her face. "Because that's what I had when you left, Ben! Nothing!"(Or, Rey discovers the World Between Worlds.)
Relationships: Kylo Ren/Rey, Rey/Ben Solo | Kylo Ren
Comments: 39
Kudos: 256





	until you return to me

**Author's Note:**

> this piece was inspired by the famous [25 Lives](https://s2b2.livejournal.com/142934.html) comic by tongari, [this post](https://lovefrompluto.tumblr.com/post/611644745529393152/save-ben-swolo-daughter-of-water-sanziene) on tumblr, and my own dissatisfaction with TROS borne anew by its recently released novelization.
> 
> i did my best to make it somewhat canon compliant, but frankly, i still don't really understand the world between worlds and basically just took as many liberties as i pleased. yay, fiction!
> 
> now that i've written the obligatory fix-it fic for this fandom, i'll go back to being AU-loving trash. but these two deserved a happy ending.

Rey likes the ones where they grow up together the best.

Ben is always older than her, always a quiet and sullen child, but he always has a little more patience with her than anyone else.

There’s one where they grow up on farms just down the road from each other; one where Ben is a prince and she is a peasant girl who works in the castle kitchens; there’s even one that takes place in the universe she knows at a Jedi academy, and they learn together under Luke – this version of her is especially smitten with Ben, all brooding good looks and unsurpassable talent in the Force, desperate to prove something. 

She watches them in universes she could never even imagine, where nothing makes much sense to her except for them – always, always them. 

She discovers a universe where space travel is unimaginable, yet magic is not, and she watches this version of herself watch Ben as he turns flowers into birds that fly with just a flick of his sure fingers. She sees herself as a child, eyes wide and already utterly taken with him as he smirks proudly, surrounded by forest and sunlight and so much hope.

“Teach me,” this young Rey breathes, full of wonder in this fragile, beautiful place. 

And teenaged Ben’s smugness melts into something soft as he looks down at her, brown eyes alight.

“Okay.”

Rey stays in this universe for a while, finds that she likes what its world has to offer: animals she’s never seen before, fantastical and inconceivable in form, food that tastes so good she couldn’t have dreamt it even while starving on Jakku, and magic to which only a select few have access. She isn’t one of them, but the Rey that belongs in this world is, and it is this Rey that trains with Ben, who pulls him into childish schemes that he always, always, reluctantly goes along with, and who kisses him shyly when they are older, under candlelight in a library, heads bent together beneath shelves of spell-books and potions.

And the real Rey observes silently from the shadows the whole time, with a heart made of glass strung tremulously within her chest – yearning, trembling, breaking. 

*

There are, of course, those lifetimes where they are enemies.

Rey had expected as much. She finds one where they’re spies, and when they fight each other, Rey is simultaneously horrified and hypnotized.

Their bodies are strong and lithe, moving around each other in a lethal dance. This Rey dresses in skin-tight black, armed to the teeth with weapons, and Ben is garbed in much the same. He swings his fists and she dodges, catching him by his shoulders and pulling herself over and behind him, her arm coming around his throat.

Ben goes still when this Rey presses cool steel to his temple. 

“Rey,” he says, voice breaking, and everything stops.

This Rey grits her teeth, eyes shining, fingers tightening around her weapon.

“You’ve given me no choice,” she whispers, broken through and through.

Ben swallows, a jerky little thing – and then his whole body seems to relax in her arms, and he closes his eyes as if suddenly and completely at peace.

“I know,” he says with a quiet resignation. “Do it. I want it to be you.”

The real Rey turns away with an earsplitting scream and wills herself to disappear.

She doesn’t think of that universe again.

*

Sometimes, they never truly meet. They brush arms in the market, board the same train, share the same planet, but never exchange a word with each other.

These are always painful lives for both of them. Ones of incompleteness, a piece of them missing. An omnipresent loneliness colors their days here, deep-rooted and smarting, and no amount of love or friendship seems capable of ripping it out.

Rey doesn’t ever interfere until she finds a particular universe like this, one in which she’s not even entirely sure she exists; all she knows is that Ben does, isolated and despondent, living in a cabin up on a mountain in the woods.

He teaches children at a small school during the day – something Rey never would’ve imagined Ben doing back in her own world, and yet it makes sense, somehow – and then he treks his way back up to his house alone, stokes the fire in his fireplace alone, and shivers in his sleep alone when the flames burn low each night.

She watches for a long time, waiting for the version of herself in this world to come to him, to find him.

When she never does, Rey can bear it no longer.

She knocks on his door, heart beating against her chest like the wings of a caged bird, breath catching in her throat when the door swings open.

It’s both thrilling and heartbreaking, the way his eyes widen at the sight of her. As if he’s been waiting for her all this time, and finally she’s come home.

“I’m lost,” Rey says to him, feeling anything but. “Could you help me?”

Ben gives her his bed, insisting when she protests, and lays out a cot far too small for his broad body on the other side of the house. When he leaves her to sleep in his room, Rey presses her nose into the soft fabric of his pillowcase and breathes in the familiar scent of him, even here, her eyes filling with tears at everything she’s lost. At everything she wants.

And god, how she wants.

In an unspoken arrangement, she stays with him. He buys extra food for her when he goes to town on the weekends, cooks delicious stews and breads for them and always makes sure she finishes all of her portion. He chops firewood outside the back of the cabin, and Rey watches from the window as thick muscles shift beneath his skin, her throat unbearably dry. 

Ben’s hair is shorter here than it ever was in her world, but still thick and black as night. His eyes are the same – dark, hooded, and longing. It makes her heart ache something fierce.

He asks her over dinner one night, “Do you have a family?”

“No,” she tells him, meeting his probing gaze. “I never have.”

This, at least, has always been true.

Ben’s eyes turn liquid across the table. She tracks the movement of his throat as it bobs with a hard swallow and wants so badly to touch, wants everything he can give her. It’s been so long, and being this near to him, seeing that look in his eyes – it’s sweet torture.

“You’re not alone anymore,” he says to her lowly, fervidly.

Rey bites the inside of her cheek to keep from crying and feels fit to burst. This, she knows; she knows this part of their story like the back of her hand, keeps it cherished and hidden in the deepest part of her heart, has replayed it a thousand times over when the loneliness consumes her.

“Neither are you,” she answers, and wills it to be true with every molecule in her quavering body.

That night, Ben plays the gentleman and retires to his cot. Rey lasts mere minutes in his bed, staring at the ceiling with a fluttering heart and sweaty palms before she peels back the covers and goes to him.

“Ben,” she calls out quietly, watching from the doorway until his eyes meet hers in the dark, hesitantly hopeful. “Come to bed with me.”

And he does.

Rey shakes like a leaf when he hovers over her, their bare legs tangled together beneath the blankets.

“Cold?” Ben murmurs, bending his head down to kiss the place beneath her ear.

She shivers and shakes her head no, twining her arms around his neck. She’s burning up everywhere their skin is touching, and it’s simultaneously overwhelming and not enough.

“Kiss me,” she all but whimpers, pulling him down to her.

Ben kisses her, and it’s deep and slow and tinged with desperation on both ends. His hands slide down her body, tracing each curve and lingering on her breasts, kneading gently as his tongue presses against hers. Rey is dizzy with sensation, overcome by a desire that has long sat doormat, waiting to ignite again ever since they’d shared that first kiss on Exegol.

At some point, Ben’s hand trails down between her legs, and she gasps into his open mouth.

“Please,” she pants, pushing her hips into his hand.

Ben groans quietly, a soft, wounded sound. She’s slick, pulsing, aching for him, and the awestruck expression on his face indicates that he can feel it.

“Rey,” he breathes, eyes wide as she grinds herself down on his fingers, desperate for more, for anything she can get. 

“I need you,” she gasps, one hand coming up to tightly grip his hair. “Ben, please, I—”

He shushes her gently, taking his hand away from where she wants it most despite her strangled cry of protest. He brushes back a lock of her hair, places a soft kiss to her lips.

“I’m here,” he murmurs, pressing himself to her entrance. “I’m not going anywhere.”

There’s a pinch and then he’s sliding all the way inside, a precious burn that steals the breath from Rey’s lungs. She feels her mouth fall open just as Ben’s head drops to her throat with a low moan.

“Perfect.” The word is dazed, muffled by her skin. “So perfect.”

Rey would agree aloud if she had the capacity for speech at the moment, but Ben starts moving and any coherent thought escapes her, overcome by a feeling of completeness she hadn’t known was possible.

Eventually, the initial burn of him stretching her open tempers off into a pleasant fullness, building in the pit of her stomach as Ben speeds up his movements, his breath coming in ragged puffs at her ear.

And it is—everything. 

It’s beyond what she had ever imagined, all those miserable nights alone on Tatooine, the wind howling outside her hut as she remembered Ben’s lips on hers and tried to picture how they’d feel other places.

The sweet words he presses into her skin, the devoted caress of his hands on her body, the sensation of his strong back flexing beneath her fingertips; it’s right and good and everything Rey believed she would never have.

The thought brings a sudden well of tears to her eyes, unstoppable in their force. Ben is warm inside of her, over her, around her, and she clings to him with everything she has as his movements become less precise.

“Baby,” he whispers, pressing sloppy kisses across the cords of her neck. “Sweetheart.”

A tear collects at the corner of her eye and slides down the bare expanse of her neck. She pulls Ben impossibly closer, urges him to move faster, to take more. His thrusts strengthen in earnest, and suddenly he’s hitting a spot that has Rey arching off the bed with a hitched moan.

“Ben, Ben,” she babbles, digging her nails into his skin, meeting him halfway each time, and then shuddering all over as her vision abruptly spots out.

Ben groans, hips stuttering, his teeth resting gently against her pulse as she clenches around him – and that’s all it takes before he’s following her into blissful oblivion, his fingers bruising at the flare of her waist, soft hair tucked beneath her chin, gasping into the valley of her breasts.

Rey wraps her arms around his warm, trembling body as he finishes, letting the tears flow freely down her face.

 _I love you,_ she thinks. _I’ve followed you across countless lifetimes. Through endless universes. No one has ever loved anyone the way that I love you._

For one night, it’s almost enough.

*

She can never stay.

Some places allow her presence for longer than others. It reminds her of the long-shattered Force bond, the way her connections to these worlds flicker in and out without warning. Every time she’s ripped out of them, Rey is hit with a fresh sense of loss that opens old wounds anew.

One nanosecond she’s in Ben’s arms, and the next she’s on her hands and knees, opening her eyes to the endless stretch of black space all around her, dotted with faraway points of light.

Through tears, she stares at her hands for a brief moment, how they appear suspended in space despite being firmly flattened against an invisible surface, thin white circles rippling away from her palms.

Rey throws herself to her feet, whirling around to face the gaping, circular portal behind her, black with the vacuum of space in the center.

“Please,” she chokes out, reaching out toward it with a shaking hand and willing it to open once more. “Just a little while longer.”

But the World Between Worlds is an fickle, mysterious, ancient thing, and the portal to her Ben in the cabin remains firmly closed. 

She knows she’s foolish for trying – she learned early on that, for whatever reason, once the Force decided her time had ended in a particular universe there was no returning to it. 

And yet, all reason is abandoned when she thinks of Ben’s reverent touches against her skin, the look on his face when together they were finally made whole.

“Please,” she rasps out again, collapsing to her knees with a shaking, empty sound.

The Force, even so, is absolute. There is no going where it does not want her.

Rey allows herself a few more tears before she rises to her feet and forces herself to turn away, on to the next.

*

There’s one world so wonderful, so perfect, so idyllic, that Rey almost finds it harder to bear than the lifetimes in which they kill each other.

It lacks the fantastical; there is no royalty, no war, no supernatural powers. It’s just them. Meeting in the quiet of a bookstore, a shared smile between strangers across the aisle.

Rey watches Ben work up the nerve to talk to her, pink dusted high on his cheekbones, and she watches herself blush right back when she agrees to go out with him.

She watches them fall in love – slow and gentle, pieced together with stolen touches and shy smiles.

She sees them pressed together in bed during the quiet of dawn, breath mingling in the little space between their naked bodies, and hears the murmur of Ben’s soft, _“Marry me, Rey,”_ pressed to the curve of her cheek.

She hears the blissed out shudder of her sighing back, _”Yes.”_

And this Rey does just that. Dressed in all white, flowers pinned throughout a single bun in her hair, lilies pouring out of the bouquet she holds. 

Ben cries at the end of the aisle when he sees her, eyes glittering brightly under a hundred twinkling lights. He is a vision in black, hair combed back, joy marked clearly across every plane of his beautiful face.

Afterward, her belly will swell with their child, and Ben will kneel before her on his knees and gaze up at her face like a wretched sinner who’s just discovered the gates of heaven, awed and brimming with devotion.

“I love you,” this Rey will say, raking the hand that bears his wedding ring through his hair as sunshine slants through the window of their home, warming them to their bones.

“I love you,” Ben will answer, will swear it, pressing it into the expanse of her stomach with an adoration that doesn’t make any sense.

And Rey, always hidden, watching at the sidelines, will feel the tears before she realizes she crying. She will reach up in wonder and touch at the wetness there, and then it will really hit her, and her already fractured soul will shatter until there’s nothing left.

*

She’s gasping, blinking at the endless expanse of space above her, around her. Her whole body is shaking, and it feels like she’s being pulled apart from the seams, ripped away piece by piece.

“Rey.”

She freezes.

Rey has heard many voices in the World Between Worlds, shadowy echoes that ring out every now and then as she travels in it: Leia, Han, Luke, Finn, Maz – and some that she doesn’t recognize but still feel familiar to her somehow.

She has never heard Ben’s voice, no matter how many times she’s called for him. Not until now.

“Ben?”

She scrambles to her feet, whirling around and—there. Yes, Ben. _Her_ Ben. 

Rey’s feet take over and she’s running, white ripples shooting out around them into never-ending space. Nothing about any of this has ever felt real since he left, just disjointed moments of pain and mystic, ancient things she can’t understand, things that hurt and take, but then she’s in Ben’s arms and it doesn’t matter anymore. He’s real, and solid, and the rest fades away.

“Rey,” he murmurs, holding her to his chest. 

“It’s really you,” she gasps, clutching that same blue sweater she’d clung to every night on Tatooine since he’d died, now stretched across his familiar chest. “You’re _here._ ”

It’s not entirely true; he’s solid and in her arms, but something is missing. Rey is vaguely aware of the fact that she can’t sense his Force signature, but pushes the thought to the back of her mind in favor of reveling in his warmth.

“I was always with you.” He presses a kiss at her hairline, and it bleeds emotion, such a simple gesture that nearly brings Rey to her knees.

She pulls away just enough to look at his face, reaching up with both hands and holding it, running her fingertips over its loved, familiar planes. Every beauty mark, every fine line, every curve. She feels dizzy, like she could fall apart and spin out into nothingness if it weren’t for Ben keeping her tethered in her spot.

“How?” she breathes, petting his cheeks, his hair. Her eyes are wide and shimmering, and she loathes to even blink, afraid he will no longer be there when she opens her eyes. “How are you here? I—I called for you.”

“I know,” he says, eyes unbearably sad, as if it pains him to admit the fact. “I’ve been here the whole time, but I couldn’t make myself visible to you. Even now, I’m not sure how…”

Rey doesn’t care. The Force is not something she tries to understand anymore – she’s convinced it’s not a possible feat anyway. As long as Ben is here, in her arms, the rest doesn’t matter.

“It doesn’t matter.” She shakes her head, running her hands down the side of his face. “You’re here. You can come home with me.”

Something in Ben’s face changes, and his eyes fall down away from hers. He reaches up and captures her hands in his own, warm and enveloping, and even through her concern at his sudden change in demeanor Rey has to resist shivering at the sensation.

“I can’t leave,” he says quietly. Rey freezes just as his eyes rise to meet hers again, apologetic yet resigned. “I’ve tried. I can’t access the portals, I can’t use the Force... I’m stuck here.”

“What?” Rey blinks, trying to process this impossible information. And then her denial quickly morphs into something more volatile. “How? _Why?_ ”

Ben’s face takes on an almost academic frustration. “I’m not sure. I think it has something to do with the Dyad. We share the same life bond in the Force, just in two different bodies. When I gave you the half that was mine on Exegol, my physical body passed on, but that other part of me… It still lives in you. And I’m not sure I can pass on to the Netherworld without it.”

Rey stares at him, at his beautiful face and deep, expressive eyes, and takes a deliberate step back.

“You would want to go to the Netherworld,” she says stiffly, “without me?”

Ben’s face contorts, first with confusion and then with a fervid sort of desperation.

“I don’t care where I end up,” he says vehemently, stepping forward to grip her forearms. “It doesn’t matter to me. You’re alive, as you should be. That’s what’s important.”

“What about what matters to me?” Rey asks, staring back at him with a carefully blank expression. “What about what _I_ want? What I wanted?”

Ben’s face shutters closed, as if a dark shadow has crossed over it, and he shakes his head. “I wasn’t going to let you die, Rey. I won’t feel bad about saving you. You deserved to live, not me. You deserved more than—”

“I don’t care what you think I deserved!”

She rips her arms away from his grasp even as every part of her screams for him to stay near, to hold her close.

“You want to talk about what’s deserved?” she shouts, teeth bared, every bit the feral desert girl she’d always be deep down. “I deserved a happy ending! _We_ deserved a happy ending! Don’t stand there and tell me that after everything you’ve been through you deserved to die, and I deserved to live, because it isn’t true! You deserved to live—to be loved! Don’t insult me by telling me I wasted my time loving you. _You deserved it, damn it!_ ”

Ben stares at her with wide eyes, both of their chests heaving with labored breaths. Rey could have never imagined their first meeting after his death going this way, but there is no stopping it now.

“Fine,” Ben finally says, frighteningly calm. “Then I’m selfish. Because I wasn’t going to do it.” His voice suddenly rises, a flash of wild anger, of desperation for her to understand, “I wasn’t going to live in a world without you!”

“But I’m supposed to live in one without you?!”

With that final shout of pain, all of Rey's energy drains out of her at once. She deflates, exhausted. She’s so tired; tired of feeling like a pawn, of being controlled by war, and legends, and family lineages that she never even knew about for most of her life. She’s tired of it all.

“You have friends,” Ben tells her after a moment, quietly. “You have people who love you.”

“If you thought that was enough, do you think that I’d be here right now?" Rey says, voice wobbling. "Having you however I can?”

"Sweetheart," he murmurs, and it’s heartbreaking. "This is not a life."

A sob rips through her throat, a defiant last stand. 

"It's better than nothing!" she shouts, hot tears coursing down her face. "Because that's what I had when you left, Ben! _Nothing!_ "

He’s suddenly around her again, wrapping her up in her arms as she cries, kissing her wherever his lips will reach.

“It’s not fair.” She’s weeping, clutching the fabric of his sweater in her fists. “It’s not fair.”

Rey doesn’t know how much time passes like that, holding each other, before she hears the soft coo of what sounds like a bird. She pulls away slightly, glancing up at Ben in confusion to find that his eyes are fixed curiously somewhere behind her.

When she turns around, she sees the same portal where she had watched that perfect life unfold, but perched at the top of it now is a small bird bearing peculiar green feathers. The bird regards them with matching green eyes, its gaze purposeful.

“Is that a Convor?” Rey sniffles, frowning.

“Her name is Morai,” Ben explains softly, his voice a bit awed. “Some believe her to be a manifestation of the Daughter.”

The Daughter. The embodiment of the light side of the Force. Another thing that Rey does not fully understand, and something she no longer wishes to. Anger ignites in her belly again at the thought, and she leans into it all too willingly.

“Are you happy?” she hisses at the bird venomously, taking a step toward where it sits atop the empty portal. “Your precious universe is in balance, so who cares about the rest of it, right?”

She gestures to herself and Ben, fury rising up in her like a geyser. “Who cares about us, right? Who cares about the _pawns_ you used to achieve it?”

She can feel it coursing through her now, the same darkness that flowed through her in Snoke’s throne room a lifetime ago, the one that allowed her to slash her way out alive. The one that had Ben holding his hand out to her, chin trembling as he begged her to join him.

“Is this balance?!” she demands, her voice nearing a scream. “A soul forced to live without its other half? A man doomed to spend eternity in limbo? Does that sound like _balance_ to you?”

The air is trembling around her, a dark, fearsome power rising out of and around her. Rage, vengeance, heartbreak – all of it melds together into a tumultuous, uncontrollable force that breaks over her in waves. Morai stares back at her, placid, unreadable.

“Rey,” Ben says in warning, stepping up behind her to grab her wrist.

But she’s a woman with nothing to lose now, and she wrenches her hand out of Ben's and wills the Force to flow through her more powerfully than ever before.

_“I want what’s mine!”_

Rey reaches out toward the bird with outstretched fingers, unsure of what it is she’s even going to do as lightening crackles from their tips—she’s being driven by this consuming anger now, rationality cast to the wayside.

Morai blinks once, slowly, and then—

A bright light.

_“Rey!”_

Everything goes black.

*

Rey wakes up not far from the place where Ben had resurrected her.

She sits up slowly, her mind foggy. She’s on Exegol, she knows that much. That pit, the one Palpatine had thrust Ben into, breaking his bones and inflicting unnamable atrocities on his already battered body, lies behind her.

Slowly, she turns her head to look at it. When she’d flown here initially, searching for – she didn’t know what, just knew that it was the last place Ben had been in this world, and that she’d felt almost possessed with the need to return to it – that pit had called out to her. There was enormous power in the Force that emanated from it, and, driven by something she had no way of knowing, she’d flung herself down it.

It hindsight, it hadn’t been her brightest idea. But nevertheless, it had been some sort of nexus that had led her to the World Between Worlds, had led her back to Ben.

And now she’s back. Innately, she knows that she had been pushed out of that place, though whether by her own actions or by that of the Daughter’s, she couldn’t be sure.

She hears BB-8 before she sees him. The droid chirps turn from frightened to jubilant, and suddenly she’s being steamrolled by a ball of metal.

“BB-8,” she says, patting the plucky droid. “Hi. How long was I gone?”

BB-8 chirps back his answer, and Rey’s eyes widen.

“Only a few minutes?” she breathes, gaze rising to the pit again in wonder.

She had lived almost entire lifetimes in there. It’s impossible that hardly any time had passed.

And yet.

“A world outside of time and space,” she whispers, awed.

Rey glances around her slowly then, as if seeing everything for the first time.

The Millennium Falcon sits right where she’d landed it. BB-8 is solid at her side. And Ben is out there, somewhere.

Not yet gone.

“No one is ever really gone,” Rey whispers. She stands to her feet, glancing down at the droid beside her. “What do you say we test that out, BB-8?”

*

She has to return to Tatooine, first. All of her meager belongings are there, and a journey to find another portal to the World Between Worlds will no doubt be a long one. She’ll have to prepare what she can.

BB-8 regards her curiously from the co-pilot seat. She’s sure the observant little droid has noticed her change in disposition; after the war, she’d been despondent, empty. Now, a fire has been lit within her, kindled by a terrifying thing called hope. For the first time since Ben had died, she has hope. She has a goal. Ben is out there, he’s not gone, and all she has to do is find her way back to him and get him out of there.

She hasn’t had a purpose in months, and she clings to this one with all she has, all the way back to Tatooine.

“You can stay on here,” she tells BB-8 when they land on the desert planet, heading quickly toward the Falcon’s exit. “I’m just going to grab a few things and I’ll be right back.”

The Falcon’s door opens with a hiss and Rey breaks out into a jog toward her hut, single-minded in her urgency. She ducks inside the entrance, eyes already searching for her clothes when—

She stops dead in her tracks. Ben is sat casually at the edge of her threadbare cot, eyes finding hers in the dim lighting. A small smile quirks up his lips.

“Took you long enough,” he says lightly, as if he hasn't just turned her entire world upside down.

Rey blinks a few times, convinced that she’s hallucinating – that her mind is just playing a cruel joke on her after all the beatings it’s taken in the last few months.

But something deep inside of her knows better; it explains why she feels this hope where there had been nothing but emptiness before. It explains the absence of that long-held ache, that wound that wouldn’t heal ever since the moment that Ben had disappeared from her hands.

Tentatively, she reaches out toward him with the Force, as clumsy and out of practice as she is, and feels it – his Force signature.

“Ben,” she gasps, hand recoiling in shock. “How are you—"

He stands, his height forcing him to crouch under the low ceiling of the hut. “After you were booted out of the World Between Worlds,” his smile twitches humorously on his beautiful mouth, “I met the Daughter. And she took me to meet the Father.”

“You… what?”

“Apparently, she thought you had made some good points about balance and all that, despite the screaming.” And now his smile was in full force, crooked teeth on display, the very smile that Rey had only ever gotten to see once before in this lifetime. “They decided that you were right. And they sent me back.”

Rey stares at him, the love of her life, and hardly allows herself to believe it.

“They sent you back,” she repeats blankly. “For... for good?”

"For good." Ben nods, stepping closer to her and gently taking his hands in hers. “I’m here, Rey.”

She’s shaking, barely calmed at all by Ben’s hand coming up to cup her cheek. There’s the blurriness of tears clouding her vision, but Rey rapidly blinks them away in favor of looking at him clearly, at _her_ Ben.

“I’m afraid to believe it,” she whispers, because she’s battered by war and heartache and trauma and knows nothing else, but Ben—Ben just bends forward and presses his lips to hers, oh-so gently, and everything inside of her quiets at once.

“It’s real,” Ben murmurs against her mouth. “I’m here. This is real.”

Rey throws her arms around his neck and kisses him back in earnest, allowing a sweet, unfathomable relief to course through her all at once, echoed again and again through the bond that hums triumphantly at their reunion, finally restored. 

And all of it is underscored by a love so intense she can’t put it into words, filling them both up until she’s sure she won't survive it, until she's positive they’re going to burst with it. 

Ben pulls away as if he senses the same thing, resting his forehead against hers.

“Rey,” he breathes into her mouth reverently. “My love. The girl who defied the gods.”

When he kisses her again, Rey tastes a hundred thousand lifetimes on his tongue, and allows herself to believe that this one finally, finally, gets a happy ending.


End file.
